by Brad Warner

I went and saw the new Godzilla movie last night in 3D at the IMAX theater in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I figure if you’re gonna go see Godzilla, do it right. I loved it.

I was cautiously optimistic about this film. I’d heard good things about it, but the 1998 American-made Godzilla movie directed by Roland Emmerich was a travesty. Perhaps if they’d called it something other than Godzilla, I would have liked it. Because it wasn’t a Godzilla movie. Roland Emmerich and his co-writer Dean Devlin did not understand Godzilla at all.

When I worked at Tsuburaya Productions I met a number of American film business people who would smile and say, “Oh I love Ultraman! I’m a huge fan!” I don’t think they expected me to actually be a fan of the show since I worked in part of the company’s sales division, and people in the sales divisions of film companies are generally clueless about what their company produces. I quite enjoyed smoking these guys out with a few key questions.

So I can just imagine Emmerich and Devlin pitching their movie to the execs at Toho who were probably just as clueless about Godzilla as they were.

After a few years of seeing how things worked on the business side, I remember thinking that there probably would never be another good Godzilla film. The business people controlled everything and they spent all their time trying to figure out what sold. Their mindset appeared to be that if you just imitated something that was successful before it was sure to be successful again. They seemed unable to see that that strategy never worked.

What makes the new Godzilla film so great is that director Gareth Edwards understood what Godzilla is and what a kaiju (Japanese monster) movie is. Emmerich and Devlin thought Godzilla was a big animal. Godzilla is not a big animal. He is the mythic representation of forces beyond human control and human domination. In the 1998 film, Godzilla is killed by a couple of missiles. GODZILLA CAN’T BE KILLED BY MISSILES! GODZILLA LAUGHS AT MISSILES!

The first Japanese Godzilla film was about the atomic bomb and how we had tampered with nature unleashing a force that we could not control or stop. In later films Godzilla came to also represent nature itself. For example, Godzilla pretty much always emerges in the south seas off of Japan and travels northward along the eastern coast. This is the path that every typhoon that strikes Japan takes. You cannot stop a typhoon with missiles. The new Godzilla movie gets this idea.

Edwards also understands the standard kaiju movie format. For example, my favorite part of any Japanese monster movie is the bullshit scientific explanation. The most stunningly ridiculous scientific explanation in any Godzilla movie is found in the American version of the second Godzilla movie, Gigantis the Fire Monster (now called Godzilla Raids Again on DVD). In that film a scientist looks at a children’s book on dinosaurs and solemnly tells the assembled military people;

“This is bad. Every lesson we’ve ever learned has told us that horrors in the world of science are part of nature’s plan. Anguillosaurus, a monster commonly known as the Anguilas, a specimen of the giant reptiles that roamed the Earth millions of years ago. Murderers, original plundering murderers who killed everything in their wake. These creatures ruled the Earth at one time but disappeared suddenly. I’ll read you what it says. ‘Enormous in its size, tremendous in its strength. Somewhere although it is not known when, these creatures may come alive after years of hibernation due to radioactive fallout.’ It is a member of the Anguirus family of fire monsters and can wipe out the human race.”

The scientific explanation in the new Godzilla isn’t quite as delicious as that. But we are shown a drawing of some Brontosaurs and Allosaurs seemingly cut out of a 1950s dinosaur book and told that Godzilla and his enemy monster Muto date from a time when the Earth was far more radioactive than it is today and that these creatures feed off of radioactivity. Oh man! Genius!

Edwards also knows that in a Godzilla movie you need to have a brooding scientist who knows what must be done battle it out with a military man who just wants to blow the monsters up, which will (of course) only make them stronger. Ken Watanabe is great as Dr Ishiro Serizawa, named after Dr. Serizawa, the brooding scientists who figures out how to kill Godzilla in the first movie and Ishiro Honda, director of most of the classic Godzilla films.

Some people have complained that there’s not enough Godzilla. But they’re wrong. It works just like a kaiju movie should. Just because these days monster movie makers shove the monster in our faces every 23 seconds doesn’t mean it’s better that way.

I happen to know a little of the back story of how this film got made. I haven’t seen anyone write about this yet. So maybe this is a scoop.

If you look at the credits you’ll notice that one of the producers is Yoshimitsu Banno. Banno directed just one Godzilla film, 1971’s Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster (the Blu Ray is called Godzilla Vs Hedorah). Although it did well, Banno tampered with the formula so much that he was never asked to direct another Godzilla movie.

His worst crime in the eyes of many fans was putting in a scene in which Godzilla files through the air using his atomic breath like a jet engine. Personally, I thought that was kind of neat. But then again, I actually like Godzilla Vs Megalon, supposedly the worst of all Godzilla films (if you want my opinion, the actual worst G-film is Godzilla Vs Space Godzilla).

For decades Banno was trying to find someone to finance his dream of making a sequel to G Vs SM. While working at Tsuburaya I met a few people over the years who’d been contacted by Banno. Sometimes they’d ask me, “Do you think this guy is legit?” I never knew how to answer. As far as I knew he wasn’t really officially connected with Toho, the company who actually owned Godzilla. As tightly as they held the reins on their one marketable character, it was hard for me to imagine they’d let an independent producer who had made only one film for them have the rights to make another, especially a big deal American movie. But I didn’t know the inner workings and I actually kind of hoped Banno would succeed. So I’d just sort of say, “You never know. He did make that one movie and it did pretty well. So maybe…”

I was both kind of shocked and kind of pleased when I saw Banno’s name attached to this film. I figured that at last there was someone on the Japanese side who wasn’t just a business guy. It seems like that made a difference. Probably without Banno in there, we’d have gotten another Emmerich-Devlin style G-movie with lots of eye candy effects but little else.

Me and Akira Ifukube circa 1998

My one complaint is the new roar they gave Godzilla. For all the advances in technology, the roar created for the very first G-film is still so much better. Listen for yourself. Legend has it that after trying a few dozen ways to make that sound effect, such as recording lions’ roars and playing them backwards as they’d done for the original King Kong, they turned to music composer Akria Ifukube for help.

Ifukube produced the roar by covering a leather glove with rosin, loosening the strings of a double bass and rubbing the glove slowly down the neck. They added some echo and slowed the tape down and voila! The greatest monster roar ever!

Now go see the movie!

Recommended Godzilla books

Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters by August Ragone – Although August wrote the text of this book, I pretty much did everything else. I pitched the project to Chronicle Books, found and then cleared the rights for all the images (no mean feat, I tell you!), wrote captions for all the images, and wrote all of the sidebars credited to anyone Japanese (after interviewing them). It’s one of the best picture books on Japanese monsters even among books published in Japan and August tells the tale of the man who made Godzilla with authority and style.

Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star by Steve Ryfle – This is the definitive history of Godzilla. Steve did incredible research not only into the Japanese original films but also into their often quite different American versions. There’s nothing you could possibly want to know about Godzilla that isn’t in this book. The only drawback is its lack of photos due to the publisher’s fears about getting sued by Toho. I provided a few photos from Tsuburaya’s library, though.

Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo by Start Galbraith IV – An oral history of Japanese monster films. Stuart talked to everybody important in making Godzilla and a slew of other Japanese kaiju movies, including Akira Kurosawa who played a fascinating tangential part in Godzilla’s history. Stuart stayed at my Tokyo apartment part of the time he was writing this.

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My head is spinning from the comments on that last thread. Some of the writing is quite good, I think.

Over on some other thread, after I quoted the usual suspects, someone commented:

“I’m more of a Brad Warner sorta guy as far as texts go.
It’s all ‘some words’, useful if we make it so.”

Howdayalikethat! Never one to be without words, I replied:

“I am constantly relearning everything I know, and yet the most important piece of the puzzle for me has been waking up and falling asleep through my sense of where I am and the freedom of that sense of where I am to move.

The rest is me coming to accept that it could be that simple, but apparently that’s my path…”

Ah, yes, dopamine, turns out beets were recommended by Russian shaman everywhere for Parkinson’s, and beets have uridine, and the latest rat studies show a 20% uptick in dopamine in rats given uridine (now available from Jarrow). Hey Boubi, you ol’ semantic requiem, get up off your cushion and give us some daily life on uridine, or whatever! Whatever… how I miss, Leah. And that angry basqueard, Proulx Michel.

Hi Mark. Last Wednesday I dislocated my ankle, and broke three bones. They
took me to emergency in an ambulance and attempted to reposition the bone.

They gave me ketamine and propofol to knock me out.

“At subanesthetic doses, ketamine produces a dissociative state, characterised by a sense of detachment from one’s physical body and the external world which is known as depersonalization and derealization.[29] At sufficiently high doses, users may experience what is called the “K-hole”, a state of extreme dissociation with visual and auditory hallucinations”

Needless to say, it felt like everything in the visual room including myself was
a spinning maelstrom of plasma, all flowing in a circular motion in various currents.

Never experienced ketamine but have read about it quite a bit. Very strange stuff, some people seem to get a dangerous addiction to the stuff (psychological). I understand it is also under study as a nearly instant cure for certain intractable depressions.

I also hope the spinning maelstrom was at least entertaining. Seems like you deserve something in return for all the general pain-in-the-ass of breaking a bone.

I watched “The Old Army Game” with WC Fields, and Louise Brooks blew my mind. I wonder if my mother saw her films when my mother was a teenager, I think Brooks might have been an influence on her. “I was simply playing myself which is the hardest thing in the world to do. …Since I never learned to act, I never had any trouble playing myself.” (from the end of part 4 of the interview).

Pandora’s Box!! Great, Mark, thanks…Louise Brooks was originally from a town just 40 miles away from me. An older fellow I met from that town’s library 25 years ago knew her and had worked with her at a Macy’s store downtown. He had many crazy “It Girl” stories. What a Wild Child!!

My biggest issue with the movie (and I had a few – like the non-certified 1Lt being assigned to a HALO jump and landing perfectly when seasoned jumpers didn’t make it, or nuclear warheads apparently leaking radiation that the MUTOs could sense, Castle Bravo being referred to as “kilotons” when it was the most powerful US nuclear detonation in history, etc., etc., etc.) was that Godzilla was not properly directed. Instead, Godzilla is portrayed as this “alpha predator” that is hunting down the MUTOs because… s/he’s bored, maybe? Or maybe they were behind on the rent or were trying to skimp on their share of the utility bills or something?

Anyway, the MUTOs just wanted to make babies and Godzilla just wanted to take out the MUTOs and the humans just happened to be there. This is where I say Godzilla 2000 got it right. In the end, Godzilla takes out Orga and then proceeds to go eco-terrorist on Tokyo. Godzilla didn’t defeat Orga to save humanity – s/he did it to save the Earth. Once the larger, more immediate danger was put under, s/he went back to putting humanity in its place because Godzilla is the embodiment of a karmic force (in the colloquial use of the term).

Very good points! I also noticed that the “alpha predator” never actually ate anything.

Godzilla 2000 shared with the TV series Ultraman Gaia the idea of a hero who protected Earth while only protecting humanity somewhat accidentally. In that series there were 2 Ultramen, Gaia who defended people and Agul who was only interested in defending the planet and didn’t think too highly of humanity.

I, for some unfathomed reason, got invited to Zen Mountain for a “visioning gathering” a couple of years before Daido-roshi died. We each received a very nice gift, a framed watercolor repro of a dragon slithering up a withered tree. On the side, in verse, was a fuller account of the exchange, offered for your metaphysical pleasure forthwith:

What is the Way?
A dragon singing
Within a withered tree.

What does this mean?
Eyeballs in a skull.

What is the dragon’s
Singing within a
Withered tree?
It still has joy.

What are the eyeballs
In a skull?
They still have senses.

What is the dragon’s
Singing within a
Withered tree?
Bloodstream has
Not stopped.

What are the eyeballs
In a skull?
Dry all the way.

I wonder, can anyone
Hear it?
Throughout the entire
Earth, there is no one
Who does not hear it.

Which verse does the
Dragon sing?
I don’t know which
Verse it is, but all those
Who hear it are lost.

“What am I, that enjoys verbose secretions, but an enabler? Where is the Godzilla, to take me out?”

Dogen Zenji:
“Buddhas and Ancestral Teachers realize the empty sky and the great earth.
When they manifest the noble body, there is neither inside nor outside in emptiness.
When they manifest the Dharma body, there is not even a bit of earth on the ground.”

I’m waiting for the Godzilla movie in which the director has the sense of humor ( and financial courage) to have a brief scene where a small crowd of people is wiped out by the horrific impact of some Godzilla guano.

Johnny E., thanks for that– I got so depressed watching “The Book of Pandora” I did 2 sittings in mid-afternoon. I watched it because in part 4 of the documentary on Louise Brooks, she says that her life was basically Lulu’s, which I took to mean that she did her best work in that film (even though she was just being herself).

She was devastatin’, all right. Beautiful camera work, lighting. In spite of the film being depressing, Louise was pretty much a constant cheer, impressive innocence and joy in spite of the script, the camera, and everything else that was going on.

I’ve been reading Milan Kundera’s TESTAMENTS BETRAYED…early on he talks about how artists, musicians, writers are attempting to escape history, in the sense of the art of creation being the expression of man’s freedom from the inescapable grind of time passing outside his control, and what that entails. But reading that I had the sense of how immediately those creations become artifacts, part of the totality, …”there is nothing extra.”

One of my “signs” lately has been a recognition of knowing as a function of breath; so the suffering of artifacts, should I experience the thought as such, is given over to a kind of not knowing in the movement of breath. The intertwine of belief and experience, ‘slot like gardening isn’t it?

“Once there is an unequivocal apperception of your true nature, once you clearly see the false as false, is there any question of having to decide the propriety or otherwise of any action ? Who will make the decision ? Does one have the independence of volition to make the decision ? Is there really any choice ? Once it is apperceived that there is no entity with any independence of action, would ‘living’ thereafter not be totally non-volitional living ? Would not, in other words, the apperceiving itself lead to an abandonment – or more accurately – a spontaneous cessation of the very concept of volitional activity ? One may think that one lives; actually, one is only ‘being lived’.”

Godzilla never did it for me as much as “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, the American film that the Japanese successfully imitated for the Godzilla series. Early Godzilla always seemed kind of goofy to me compared to the freaky Beast.

The 2nd para in your link above describes relative/absolute very well, I think! Ramesh was said to be the best translator in the way that he naturally romanticized the verbiage, he “humanized” his teacher’s teaching unlike some of the other accounts. Poetry/literal translation.

What I hear in Suzuki’s response to Hartman is “call it whatever you want.”

“sitting in awareness of the breath…” Shahid, the Witness, apprehends the Waqt, the Moment, when Awareness is aware of itself. There are layers, like an onion, that lead ever deeper into the mystery of Awareness unaware of itself. “…no special practice is necessary.”

Yeah, this (what we’re doing, commenting, etc.) is representative of the relative, but it simultaneously contains everything all at once, just like an onion is not just surface, it is also the whole enchilada, the totality, the absolute.

&Using concepts like relative and absolute (or onions!) are a convenient way to talk about aspects of something that can’t in reality be divided.

“On the other hand, one time I had been sitting a one day sitting counting my breathes and I really got into it and period after period it seemed like I’d counted every breath and never strayed so I went up to him in dokusan and I said, well now I can count every breath, what do I do next? And he leaned forward and said to me fiercely and sternly, “Don’t ever think that you can sit zazen! That’s a big mistake! Zazen sits zazen!” I was impressed by that. That was the first time I’d gone to him feeling proud of myself.” Hartman, here.

ok, I didn’t quite have that right, she was counting every breath at the time.

“Shahid, the Witness, apprehends the Waqt, the Moment, when Awareness is aware of itself.” through the water of life, swimmingly?

“…One may think that one lives; actually, one is only ‘being lived’.” Exhausted by this brief but animated exposition, Maharaj lay back again in his bed, and said that he would have liked to expand this point further, but he just did not have the physical strength. He added, with a wary touch of humour, that it was perhaps just as well that he could now only give out capsules of knowledge.

“You know, sometimes zazen gets up and walks around”– ok, so the first time my experiments in self-hypnosis paid off, I wasn’t counting breaths, I was just trying to remain aware of them all day. Much more organic to recognize suffering, and return to falling asleep or waking up, but I can’t even do that.

And the Methodist’s a blogger;
They’re a long corn blogger,
And the Methodist a blogger,
And they’re a blogger, too.
They’ll talk about Hell
And Heaven on high,
And the next thing you know,
They’re a-blogging for the pie.

Chorus: And it’s all a blogger;
It’s a Google-blog blogger,
And it’s all a blogger–
That’s the way with the world.

On behalf of us all, and perhaps Bradley two, I’d like to thank Leah for her cogent remarks added on the thread on the last post late, and Randy for a description also late on the last post of an ordinary, every-day kind of hero who flinches or craps if you poke him, he’s under so much stress, but nevertheless acts compassionately.

Leah, when I echoed your “whatever”, I was poking fun indeed, but I hope appreciatively– you and Randy are the most inoffensive people, and I personally find that admirable–I hear “whatever” as your willingness to accept your role, whatever that might be.

Dragons that lick, and dragons that bite
Dragons that howl, through the night
Broken skulls, all over the floor
Koans swinging in an open door

By much goading and pleading from my son, we finally had a chance to see Godzilla last weekend. I am so glad my son has convinced us to see this awesome movie. I had in my head that it would be dreadfully dull and unimaginative. Boy, was I wrong! I’m so glad that sometimes my children knows best!